Lead DOGE senator calls for end to expensive telework negotiations by outgoing Biden agencies, citing voter expectations

The Senate’s top DOGE Republican will send 24 letters – one to each major federal agency head – demanding a halt to last-minute work-from-home negotiations before President Biden returns to Delaware.

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, chair of the Senate GOP Policy Committee, made the demand days after crafting legislation for 2025 that would “decentralize” and relocate one-third of the federal workforce outside Washington, D.C.

That bill’s lengthy acronym spells out “DRAIN THE SWAMP Act.”

Ernst said that not a single government agency’s office space is half-occupied two-plus years on from the COVID-19 pandemic, and she previously called for the Biden administration to sell off unused real estate for taxpayers’ benefit.

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In her letters, Ernst laid out that 90% of telework-eligible federal employees are still working from home and only 6% report they are working on a “full-time basis.”

Additionally, she wrote that public-sector unions are purportedly “dictating personnel policy” without regard to federal directives from the Office of Management & Budget (OMB), which is running up a massive tab and leading to wastes of time, space, and money.

“The union bosses are rushing to lock in last minute, lavish long-term deals with the lame-duck Biden administration—extending beyond President Trump’s next term in office—guaranteeing that bureaucrats can stay at home for another four years or longer,” Ernst wrote in one letter prepped for Office of Personnel Management director Robert Shriver III.

“Apparently, protecting telework perks for public employees is a higher priority than showing up to serve American taxpayers,” she wrote, calling Biden’s submission to union demands “shocking and unacceptable.”

She noted it was a similarly liberal president who vociferously opposed unionization of public employees in the first place, as Democrat Franklin Roosevelt wrote in a letter to a union steward declining a 1937 invitation to a national federal employee union convention.

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“It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions